"Henry Kuttner - Beggars in Velvet UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

How do you destroy any cancer? Venom bubbled in the thought.
Radium, Burkhalter thought. Radioactivity. The atomic bombs-
Dusting off? he wondered.
A burning coldness of affirmation answered him. No human must live to tell about it. Towns have been dusted off before-by other towns. Pinewood may get the blame this time -there's been rivalry between it and Sequoia.
But that's impossible. If the Sequoia teleaudios have gone dead-
We're sending out faked messages. Any copters coming in
will be stopped. But we've got to finish it off fast. If one human escapes- Her thoughts dissolved into inhuman, inarticulate yammering, caught up and echoed avidly by a chorus of other minds.
Burkhalter shut oil the contact sharply. He was surprised, a little, to find that he had been moving toward the hospital all during the interchange, circling through the outskirts of Sequoia. Now he heard with his conscious mind the distant yelling that grew loud and faded again almost to silence, and then swelled once more. The mindless beast that ran the streets could be sensed tonight even by a nontelepath.
He moved silently through the dark for a while, sick and shaken as much by his contact with a paranoid rnind as by the threat of what had happened and what might still come.
Jeanne d'Arc, he thought. She had it too, that power to inflame the mind. She, too, had heard-"voices?" Had she perhaps been an unwitting telepath born far before her time? But at least there had been sanity behind the power she exercised. With Barbara Pell-
As her image came into his mind again her thought touched him, urgent, repellently cool and controlled in the midst of all this holocaust she had deliberately stirred up. Evidently something had happened to upset their plans, for-
Burkhalter, she called voicelessly. Burkhalter, listen, We'll co-operate with you.
We hadn't intended to, but-where is the Mute, Hobson?
I don't know.
The cache of Eggs has been moved. We can't find the bombs. It'll take hours before another load of Eggs can be flown here from the nearest town. It's on the way. But every second we waste increases the danger of discovery. Find Hob-son. He's the only mind we can't touch in Sequoia. We know no one else has hidden the bombs. Get Hobson to tell us where they are. Make him understand, Burkhalter. This isn't a matter affecting only us. If word of this gets out, every telepath in the world is menaced. The cancer must be cut out before it spreads.
Burkhalter felt murderous thought-currents moving toward him. He turned toward a dark house, drifted behind a bush, and waited there till the mob had poured past, their torches blazing. He felt sick and hopeless. What he had seen in the faces of the men was horrible. Had this hatred and fury existed for generations under the surface-this insane mob
violence that could burst out against Baldies with so little provocation?
Common sense told him that the provocation had been sufficient. When a telepath killed a nontelepath, it was not dueling-it was murder. The dice were loaded. And for weeks now psychological propaganda had been at work in Sequoia.
The non-Baldies were not simply killing an alien race. They were out to destroy the personal devil. They were convinced by now that the Baldies were potential world conquerors. As yet no one had suggested that the telepaths ate babies, but that was probably coming soon, Burkhalter thought bitterly.
Preview. Decentralization was helping the Baldies, because it made a temporary communication-embargo possible. The synapses that connected Sequoia to the rest of the world were blocked; they could not remain blocked forever.
He cut through a yard, hurdled a fence, and was among the pines. He felt an impulse to keep going, straight north, into the clean wilderness where this turmoil and-fury could be left behind. But, instead, he angled south toward the distant hospital. Luckily he would not have to cross the river; the bridges would undoubtedly be guarded.
There was a new sound, discordant and hysterical. The barking of dogs. Animals, as a rule, could not receive the telepathic thoughts of humans, but the storm of mental currents raging in Sequoia now had stepped up the frequency- or the power-to a far higher level. And the thoughts of thousands of telepaths, all over the world, were focused on the little village on the Pacific Slope.
Hark, hark! The dogs do bark!
The beggars are coming to town-
But there's another poem, he thought, trying to remember. Another one that fits even better. What is it-
The hopes and fears of all the years -
V
The mindless barking of the dogs was worst. It set the pitch of yapping, mad savagery that washed up around the hospital like the rising waves of a neap tide. And the patients were receptive too; wet packs and hydrotherapy, and, in a few cases, restraining jackets were necessary.
Hobson stared through the one-way window at the village far below. "They can't get in here," he said.
Heath, haggard and pale, but with a new light in his eyes, nodded at Burkhalter.
"You're one of the last to arrive. Seven of us were killed. One child. There are ten others still on their way. The rest- safe here."
"How safe?" Burkhalter asked. He drank the coffee Heath had provided.
"As safe as anywhere. This place was built so irresponsible patients couldn't get out. Those windows are unbreakable. It works both ways. The mob can't get in. Not easily, anyhow. We're fireproof, of course."
"What about the staff? The non-Baldies, I mean."
A gray-haired man seated at a nearby desk stopped marking a chart to smile wryly at Burkhalter. The consul recognized him: Dr. Wayland, chief psychiatrist.
Wayland said, "The medical profession has worked with Baldies for a long time, Harry. Especially the psychologists. If any non-Baldy can understand the telepathic viewpoint, we do. We're noncombatants."
"The hospital work has to go on," Heath said. "Even in the face of this. We did something rather unprecedented, though. We read the minds of every non-Baldy within these walls. Three men on the staff had a preconceived dislike of Baldies, and sympathized with the lynchings. We asked them to leave. There's no danger of Fifth Column work here now."
Hobson said slowly, "There was another man-Dr. Wilson. He went down to the village and tried to reason with the mob."
Heath said, "We got him back here. He's having plasma pumped into him now."
Burkhalter set down his cup. "All right. Hobson, you can read my mind. How about it?"
The Mute's round face was impassive. "We had our plans, too. Sure, I moved the Eggs. The paranoids won't find 'em now."
"More Eggs are being flown in. Sequoia's going to be dusted off. You can't stop that."
A buzzer rang; Dr. Wayland listened briefly to a transmitted voice picked up a few charts and went out. Burkhalter jerked his thumb toward the door.
"What about him? And the rest of the staff? They know, now."
Heath grimaced. "They know more than we wanted them to know. Until tonight, no nontelepath has even suspected the existence of the paranoid group. We can't expect Way-land to keep his mouth shut about this. The paranoids are a menace to non-Baldies. The trouble is, the average man won't differentiate between paranoids and Baldies. Are those people down there"-he glanced toward the window-"are they drawing the line?"
"It's a problem," Hobson admitted. "Pure logic tells us that no non-Baldy must survive to talk about this. But is that the answer?"
"I don't see any other way," Burkhalter said unhappily. He thought suddenly of Barbara Pell and the Mute gave him a sharp glance.
"How do you feel about it, Heath?"
The priest-medic walked to the desk and shuffled case histories. "You're the boss, Hobson. I don't know. I'm thinking about my patients. Here's Andy Pell. He's got Alzheimer's disease-early senile psychosis. He's screwed up. Can't remember things very well. A nice old guy. He spills food on his shirt, he talks my ear off, and he makes passes at the nurses. He'd be no loss to the world, I suppose. Why draw a line, then? If we're going in for killing, there can't be any exceptions. The non-Baldy staff here can't survive, either."
"That's the way you feel?"